Finding peace after an unpredictable season
It was not an easy year. It was actually the worst year I’ve experienced since I started farming six seasons ago.
I don’t want to seem ungrateful, because there were still many successes hidden amongst the woes of the season of the rain. But 2024 has made me really pause to think about the farm’s future and what these years of sustained chaos may look like. I know many farmers are doing the same, with some already choosing to leave farming behind or take a season off to reevaluate what they’ll be doing moving forward.
Usually by this time of the year, I am starting to feel anew for next season, hopeful as I flip through all of the seed catalogs arriving in my mailbox. This December feels different – I am mostly just not amused with thinking about next year yet. During my lower days, I feel apathetic toward it all.
How does the farm move ahead when it’s impossible to predict what next season will bring? Will there be a season-long drought or 12 inches of rain in one month’s time? Will we have a mild, warm spring or a cold, wet one? Does it pay to invest in a certain type of equipment, even knowing that it will only be useful if the weather is one way or the other? How will the economy be in May of 2025? Will people see local food as an added expense they can’t afford or will there be less options in grocery stores, pushing people to ask their nearby farmers to grow more?
Those are only a smattering of the questions that run through my head when thinking about the farm. However, there are things I still know for sure:
I love farming and growing food for people.
Despite the stressful growing situations in 2024, the majority of my CSA members were very happy with what they received.
This land needs me to be attentive and tune in to how it could benefit from changes like additional cover crops or simply allowing certain areas to just be, opting to not use them for production.
While I am not ready to deep dive into numbers and plans and purchases for next year yet, I am optimistic that the farm will find success in 2025. That success may look different than how I originally envisioned it, but there are always achievements that should be celebrated. This season’s included completing my first CSA deliveries for 16 weeks, selling into the statewide LFPA program that got my produce into food access networks and continuing to steward the farm’s land in a way I feel good about. There’s a lot of life being lived on this land now – animals and insects are more abundant (new arrivals this year were a family of skunks and a beautiful elusive fox) and I feel like I am an extension of this wonderful, wild place.
For now, I am focusing on rest and finding peace as I put the 2024 season to bed. The farm is tucked away for the winter – the garlic and spring onions are blanketed with mulch or frost fabric, irrigation has been wound up and stashed away and the cover crops will remain sleepy for a while. I have been attempting to find moments to reflect and release as I’ve transitioned back to my winter job and we’ve stumbled into holiday busyness.
I’m sure by the time January and February arrive, I will begin to feel that familiar eagerness – the needing to get back to the plants, the soil, the land. It will be a new beginning, another season of hope on the horizon. In the meantime, I’m happy to walk out into the snow and have a break from farm thinking, however brief it may be.